Urban Information Officer, Government Documents, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, September, September, 2001-June, 2003

Oversee the production of contemporary and historical overviews of 13 counties, approximately 100 cities, villages, and towns, and 77 Chicago community areas in the Chicago-Gary-Kenosha Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA) for the Local Community Fact Book 2000. The Local Community Fact Book 2000 is the continuation of a series of statistical & narrative overviews of the city of Chicago and the metropolitan region originated by the University of Chicago Department of Sociology in the 1920s. As part of my duties, I created a website as a Local Community Fact Book 2000 Resource Manual for authors of the community narratives.

Project Coordinator, Near West Project, University of Illinois at Chicago, August, 1999-June, 2001

The purpose of the Near West Project was to explore the dynamics of urban life on the Near West Side and other areas adjacent to Hull House in the late 19th and early 20th Century, as part of a website to be made available in 2002. I was responsible for writing, editing, and compiling essays, photographic galleries, maps, and primary textual documents on the historical geography, the African-American community, and the vice district of the Near West Side from 1830 to 1930.

H-Urban (www.h-net.msu.edu/~urban), established in 1993, was the first of the H-Net scholarly forums on history and the humanities, and served as a model for many of those that followed. In 2001, H-Urban announced its on-line Teaching Center (www.h-net.msu.edu/~urban/teach) and Web Links site (www.h-net.msu.edu/~urban/weblinks). The Teaching Center is a comprehensive site offering as its first initiative over one hundred undergraduate urban studies and history syllabi, organized by author, geographical scope, and subject. The Web Links site is an annotated list of urban studies and history sites selected for their scholarly quality by a senior scholar.

As the founder and major editor, I have been responsible for initiating and screening the daily discussion list as well as overseeing the above Web initiatives, especially the Teaching Center.

Established at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993, H-Net (since moved to Michigan State University) is an umbrella organization for over 100 scholarly Internet forums on history and the humanities.

COMM-ORG was an on-line seminar involving periodic presentations of working papers and discussion on the history and practice of community organizing and/or community-based development. Comm Org is now an independent list edited by Randy Stoecker at University of Toledo (http://comm-org.utoledo.edu/).

Research Assistant, Text Encoding Initiative, Computer Center, University of Illinois at Chicago, September 1990-August, 1999

Text Encoding Initiative is an international initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and other grantors since 1987 to create a standard for the encoding of electronic texts in the humanities. Objectives include encouraging collaborative analysis of texts by scholars, and easy and accurate interchange and use of texts independent of operating system (e.g. DOS, Windows, Unix, Macintosh) and format (Word, Word Perfect, HTML).

"Electronic Texts in the Historical Profession: Perspectives from Across the Scholarly Spectrum" in Orville Vernon Burton, ed., Computing in the Social Sciences (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, March, 2003). Available at: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/epub/books/burton/

Review of Carl Smith, "The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory" WWW site, Chicago Historical Society, in The Public Historian, 19:2 (Spring, 1997) (with Perry Duis)